Thursday, March 14, 2013

Malaysia uses spyware against own citizens, NYT reports

Malaysia uses spyware against own citizens, NYT reports

By Boo Su-LynMarch 14, 2013

The report said the spyware was likely being used for “politically-motivated surveillance”. — Reuters picKUALA
LUMPUR, March 14 — Malaysia is among 25 countries using off-the-shelf
spyware to keep tabs on citizens by secretly grabbing images off
computer screens, recording video chats, turning on cameras and
microphones, and logging keystrokes, US newspaper the New York Times (NYT) reported yesterday.
Besides Malaysia, researchers at Citizen Lab based at the University
of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs found that the United States,
Singapore, Indonesia and Britain also used the surveillance software
known as FinSpy.

“Rather than catching kidnappers and drug dealers, it looks more
likely that it is being used for politically motivated surveillance,”
security researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire was quoted by NYT as saying.
Martin J. Muench, managing director of Gamma Group — a British
company that sells FinSpy — has reportedly said that Gamma Group sold
its technology to governments solely to monitor criminals, and that it
was most often used against “paedophiles, terrorists, organised crime,
kidnapping and human trafficking”.
Marquis-Boire, however, pointed out that the software was open to
abuse, saying: “If you look at the list of countries that Gamma is
selling to, many do not have a robust rule of law.”

Global human rights group Human Rights Watch said in its 2013 report
that Malaysia has yet to ratify core human rights treaties, despite
being a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

It added that Putrajaya continued to violate the rights to free
association and public assembly last year, besides decreasing freedom of
expression by amending the Evidence Act.

FinSpy was used in emails targeted at political dissidents in
Ethiopia and on Android phones in Vietnam, according to Marquis-Boire’s
report published on the Citizen Lab website yesterday.

FinSpy was also found in emails targeting Bahraini activists last
July. Turkmenistan’s Ministry of Communications also ran FinSpy off its
own computer system, according to the report.

Human Rights Watch called Turkmenistan last month one of the most repressive governments in the world.
“Our findings highlight the increasing dissonance between Gamma’s
public claims that FinSpy is used exclusively to track ‘bad guys’ and
the growing body of evidence suggesting that the tool has and continues
to be used against opposition groups and human rights activists,” said
the Citizen Lab report.